All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed
us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united
with Christ. Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ
to be holy and without fault in His eyes. Ephesians 1:3,4
That which has been chosen before the foundation of the world
and which has been foreordained unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, has
been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. That is the fullness
of God’s thought for His own, as a full, comprehensive, utter thought. We have
not yet come into all those blessings, not because God has not given them, but
because we have not grown up into them. We have not grown up into Him in all
things. That is the point of our word, the urge to come to God’s thought, the
measure of Christ.
What is God’s thought? The full measure of Christ, the fullness
of the stature of Christ. That is God’s thought for us. Let us lay hold of
God’s thoughts; let us by faith appropriate those thoughts, let us believe in
God’s thoughts, let us seek to get into line with those thoughts, and take the
Holy Spirit and His energies to form us, and constitute us, that God’s thoughts
may become living expressions in us. That is His purpose: to bring us to the
full measure of Christ. All that we need to do is to state that as a definite
fact, but, mark you, it represents a tremendous responsibility. We cannot talk,
and hear about things like that without coming under tremendous responsibility.
If this is the revelation of God from heaven in Christ through His Word and to
our hearts by the Holy Spirit, then it involves us in very great
responsibility. Is it necessary to speak about responsibility? Ought not God’s
thought for us really draw out our hearts in unspeakable gratitude and worship?
Ought we not to recognize these other words here associated with the calling: “according to the good pleasure of His will,”
the Lord’s delight? You remember what Joshua and Caleb said when they reported on
the land: “If the Lord delight in us He will bring us in.” That is only what we
have here. Christ is the Land of God’s fullness, and it is according to the
good pleasure of His will that we should come into that fullness.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither
are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.
"As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher
than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:8-9
No comments:
Post a Comment